Your Next: Norrath Officially Under Construction

Sony Online Entertainment mobilizes the world's largest dev team.

Just when you thought it was safe to hang up your legendary picks, the Landmark development team have dropped an epic reason to dive right back in.

I've spent a number of weeks sharing ideas about EverQuest Next and Landmark through the context of other games and general MMO design goals. I haven't felt the need to share any specific developments about the games with you, as I feel like if you're here you are probably keeping up to date with the news.

This week is different; a new development has come around that, for me, will be a defining feature of Landmark and something that I hope continues for years to come. So permit me, dear reader, to gush for a while about how amazing everything is and how Landmark and EverQuest Next are going to be the best things EVAR.

One of the biggest draws for Landmark when it was revealed, way back in the distant past, was the chance for players to have their own creations show up in the upcoming EverQuest incarnation. This possibility is still incredibly exciting, but now SOE has gone one better and given us optimists something to point at to prove they want the input of players.

The Workshop is a wonderful idea and I'm hoping it evolves into an ongoing exchange of ideas in a way that truly makes the participants the largest development team in the world. The best part is that it's not just about building—it’s about concept and style and it's about all the myriad ways the personality of a culture can be conveyed. What a privileged bunch we are to be a part of that.

The idea, like many ideas surrounding the game, is a fresh and elegant solution to a long standing problem. Only recently I was having conversations with my friends about the double edged sword of open development, how players can often be left waiting and wondering for long stretches. It's how “SOON” became an inside joke on the roads we travel, with nothing but a description of the destination and a journey of fits and starts; sooner or later we start asking 'are we there yet?'.

This process is at once designed to relieve beta fatigue of the players and inject ideas and perspectives into a team that has been working in a bubble for a long time.

After the first Roundtable that was a straight up democratic vote, the Dark Elf style narrowly beat the Dwarves for the first EverQuest Next racial style to be opened up for review and iteration by the beta testers. This is an invaluable opportunity for SOE, to gather so many ideas and opinions at a stage where real changes can be made is a wonderful thing for them, and as a player I'm really excited to see where this process takes us.

Looking ahead into the far future, I dare not even imagine what walking around the new Norrath will be like, how much the setting and history of the world will mean to us as players before we even set a virtual foot in it. If you can name another MMO that can make that claim, let me know because I want to play it.

Remember the old days when developers had to make a game, send it out into the world hoping that people would like it, and hope it wasn't broken in a way that made it unplayable?

For all the stink early access and 'paying to beta test' attracts, in my opinion this is an example of the process done right, and a standard that I hope other companies will be judged by. 

Thanks for allowing me to have a little geek-out this week. I promise I'll be back to pretending I know what I'm talking about soon!

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